Study reveals parents, kids interaction on Facebook

WASHINGTON: World's largest social networkhas reportedly released a new data about how parents and their children interact online, illustrating how personal interactions on Facebook can mirror those in the so-called real world.

"With the holidays approaching, and families gathering all over the world, we wanted to understand how parents and children on Facebook communicate," CNN quoted a post, which crunches friend requests, conversations and other Facebook data from the past two months, as saying.

"We are happy to see that our data surfaces the affection, care, and closeness of family ties," it added.

According to the Facebook data, more than 65 percent of friendships between 13-year-olds and their parents are initiated by the child, but the older the teenager gets, the less likely he or she is to be the one sending the friend request.

However, as kids grow into their 30s and 40s, they begin friending their parents more often again, the report said.

The firm also found moms and dads initiate parent-child conversations more often than their teenage kids. For daughters, this imbalance evens out by the time they hit 30 and are messaging their parents as often as they receive messages in return. Sons, however, however, take twice as long-until age 60 -- to come around, Facebook noted.

The data team, which studied hundreds of thousands of public Facebook messages between parents and children to identify the words and phrases that appeared most often, mostly found that Mom and Dad are very proud of their kids.

Among the most common phrases from parents: "I'm so proud, "all my heart," "well done," "proud of you" and "call me," Facebook said.

It also noted that moms and dads use language much differently when messaging with sons, though. Mothers preferred endearments like "my handsome son" and "my little boy," while dads used profanity and words like "buddy" and "dude," the report added.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Google search algorithm helps track spread of cancer

NEW YORK: The equations search engineGoogle employs to predict the webpages its users visit has inspired a new way to track the spread of cancer cells in the human body. 

"Each of the sites where a spreading, or metastatic, tumour could show up are analogous to Web pages," said Paul Newton, a mathematician at University of Southern California. 

Google ranks webpages by the likelihood that an individual would end up visiting each one randomly. These predictions are based on the trends of millions of users across the Web, the 'Live Science' reported. 

It uses the "steady state distribution" to calculate the probability of someone visiting a page. 

"You have millions of people wandering the Web, [and] Google would like to know what proportion are visiting any given Web page at a given time. 

"It occurred to me that steady state distribution is equivalent to the metastatic tumour distribution that shows up in the autopsy datasets," Newton said. 

The referred dataset contains information about autopsy patients from the 1920's to the 1940's, who died before chemotherapy was available. 

By focusing on this group of patients, the researchers could track the natural progression of cancer, specifically lung cancer, without different treatments interfering with the data. 

Out of fifty metastasis sites described in the autopsy reports, the scientists found that twenty-seven contained cancer that appeared to have spread from the lungs. 

Just like with an individual browsing the Web, cells that break off from the original lung tumour and entered the bloodstream had a certain probability of progressing to different locations. 

Following the Google's example with search results, the researchers split the sites where the lung cancer spread to into two groups into first and second order. 

In first order sites, tumour cells would most likely reach them by travelling directly from the lung. Tumours are more likely to reach second order sites by colonising a first order site and then spreading to the second order location. 

Researchers, using this approach, were even able to estimate the average times it takes the cancer to spread to different parts of the body, the report said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Computer predicts sudden cardiac death risks

WASHIGTON: A computer model predicted the risk of irregular heartbeats and sudden cardiac death, making possible more complex cardiac models to calculate the consequences of genetic, lifestyle and other changes to the heart. 

"This is a strong proof-of-principle study showing that computer simulation can be used to predict risk of cardiac arrhythmias (erratic beats)," said Coeli M Lopes, assistant professor at the Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute,University of Rochester Medical Centre, who led the study. 

Researchers plan on using IBM's supercomputer, the Blue Gene/Q, to develop a model of the whole human heart, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reports. 

With this study under their belts, the research team, including several scientists from the Medical Centre, the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and the IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences in Melbourne, Australia, is pursuing a much more sophisticated model of the whole human heart. 

They plan to predict the effects of new drugs on the electrical activity of the heart -- one of the most challenging hurdles in the development of new drugs and an extremely important part of keeping potentially dangerous drugs off the market, according to a Rochester statement. 

The computer model, designed by IBM scientists Matthias Reumann and J Jeremy Rice, includes 192 heart cells made to function electrically like the ventricle wall by assigning varying properties to cells based on their position -- inside, middle, or outside -- in the heart wall. 

IBM scientists used canine cardiac cells as a guide, adapting the model cells to act more like ours based on extensive data on the electrical properties of the human heart. In the end, the simulation requires the solution of more than 100,000 complex mathematical equations at least 1,000 times over just to simulate a single heartbeat. 

The team turned to more than 600 patients with Long QT syndrome type 1, an inherited disorder that puts patients at greater risk of arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death - to help test the model. Patients were drawn from the US, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Versions of Word Press

How to Test the Beta Versions of Word Press Plugins

Do you like trying out new services and tools before anyone else? If you consider yourself an early adopter or just want to test out the beta version of WordPress Plugins (along with stable versions), there’s an easy way to do so.
Just remember that the beta version of any service or tool will contain bugs. It’s important that you frequently backup your blog, especially before upgrading to any new beta version; this way if something goes wrong you can always restore your blog back to its previous state. You don’t want your blog to stop functioning because of a bad plugin update. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
So here’s how to easily test the beta versions of WordPress Plugins:
1. From your blog dashboard search for, install, and activate Plugin Beta Test for WordPress.
2. That’s really it; there’s no settings to customize or anything else to do besides visit the Plugins section of your blog.

3. When there is a new beta version of a plugin to test out, you’ll see a message underneath the plugin – just like with stable versions.

4. You can also go to the “Updates” submenu under the “Home” menu to see which plugins have beta releases available.
Good luck and remember to be careful!

http://maketecheasier.com

Technology Tip Number 3

Just Googling Around-3

The internet is big, really, really big, and if you want to use it effectively you have to be familiar with search engines.  Google.com has become the search engine of choice for millions of internet users.  There are others and if the past is any guide there will be a “better than Google” search engine some day, but for now Google seems to be the best.  Part of the reason they are the best is that they keep developing new ways of looking at the internet.  Below are a couple additional features that Google offers that you might want to check out now and in the future as they continue to develop:

http://news.google.com/  Need a current event?  Forget about the newspaper, use the internet like teenagers do to find stories that are only minutes old.

http://images.google.com/  Arguably the best image search engine in the world.  Try finding a picture of something today.

http://www.google.com/products  Looking to make a purchase. Shop and compare prices online first using Google's Product Search.

http://www.google.com/finance  What to check the stock market, try this website for a quick overview.

http://maps.google.com/   Looking for an up to date map or satellite photo, check out these amazingly easy to manipulate maps and photos.

http://video.google.com/  Google has their own video search engine.  Find an educational video on the internet that you can play for your class

http://scholar.google.com/  Another project that Google is working on is to create a more efficient way to search scholarly papers.

http://books.google.com/  This is a great way to jump into some literature.  Check out a book online, read some passages and find out where you can buy a copy.

http://www.180techtips.com

Technology Tip Number 2

Making Sound Judgments

Did you ever sit down at a computer that had the sound cranked way up?  Ever wanted to hear something on the computer but you couldn’t because the volume is turned down too low?  Here’s what to do when you judge the sound on your computer to be wrong. 

Go to the “Task Bar” at the bottom of your desktop screen.  Look for the little gray speaker symbol on the right hand side and left click on it.

This icon should appear on your screen and give you the opportunity to change your sound level or mute it by checking the “MUTE” box at the bottom.

For a more speaker options you could right click on the speaker symbol in the Task Bar.  Then select “Open Volume Control” to make adjustments to this menu:

If you only have the speaker that is in the computer to work with (no external speakers) the sound quality is probably pretty low already.  Making adjustments to this menu might not be of any use to you.

PRACTICE ACTIVITY:  Click on the sound icon and try adjusting the volume all the way up and all the way down until you find a level you’re most comfortable with.

TO KEEP ON LEARNING:  If you'd like to learn more about adjusting the sound on your computer, adding and controlling external speakers, or what all those options are on the volume control search the internet for: 

http://www.180techtips.com/1.htm

Technology Tip Number -1

Your Computer Mouse

The ubiquitous mouse has become one of the most important and effective tools for interacting with the computer.  There are a couple different kinds of computer mice but they all pretty much do the same thing.  They move the pointer around the screen so you can select different things.

Clicking and Double Click is not only hard to explain but at first it's pretty hard to do too.  Here's is a great website that can help you practice this important skill:  http://www.mouseprogram.com/ 
There is also an activity at that website to help you practice Clicking and Dragging.

If you have an older computer mouse it probably works on a track ball which is located under the mouse.  Occasionally this track ball will get dirty and your mouse pointer will skip around the screen randomly.  When this happens you can easily fix it by opening the bottom disc that holds the track ball in and then removing any foreign objects that might be causing the mouse to behave erratically.

If you have a newer computer mouse you probably have an optical mouse.  These mice are much more reliable since they have no moving parts and will work on just about any surface.  If you’d like to learn more about how they work you can check out this website:  http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question631.htm   

The advantage to this new kind of mouse is that it has no moving parts.  And the red LED light isn’t any more dangerous than a flashlight (it’s not a laser beam).

PRACTICE ACTIVITY:  Whether you have a track ball mouse or an optical mouse try finding a surface that your computer mouse won’t work on . . .  But don’t waste too much time.

TO KEEP ON LEARNING:  If you'd like to learn more about your computer mouse try searching the internet for: 

http://www.180techtips.com